Looking for novels about discovering esoteric knowledge - doesn't have to be occult. Picrel's source book is nothing like the movie but it's along the lines of what I'd enjoy. Just someone who is devoted to seeking knowledge no matter the danger and/or cost.
>>23328327Pynchon, primarily V. GR and AtD. Eco -Foucault's Pendulum.
>>23328327the da vinci code
>>23328383Well, maybe not V. since that is only half the book and its purpose is not really in line with what you are after. GR is the most on point to your needs but AtD has the occult angle and explores the whole search/discovery thing in many different ways from the simple pragmatic familial revenge to solving the universe.
>>23328327Any graduate level maths textbook
M.R. James uses the trope quite often. Lovecraft too occasionally
>>23328383Thanks>>23328391Yes, but already read it. ty>>23328395Grim
Hermann Hesse, Demian
>>23328409t. Πυθαγόρας
>>23328410Seems like Lovecraft's entire thing really, though he mostly just seems concerned with how horrifying and unknowable things are. The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is about descending into a dream world full of spooky priests and cities full of cats and people being encased alive in bridges as sacrifices.
>>23328950>the secret knowledge was in me all along, and the friends we made along the way
>>23328327Siddhartha? it's about a person gaining spiritual knowledge.
Seeking esoteric wisdom through literature can only go so far. You continue to read book after book, and surely you enjoy them, but something is missing, there is always a hole, always something more to be devoured. Perhaps you are simply chasing the feeling you achieved when you truly resonated with your first great work, I remember those feelings fondly with books I read and even shows I watched in my late teens. Shows that I now regard as simplistic and unrefined but changed the very shape of my soul.Few works tackle this specific malaise but one that truly stood out to me in my older years (Im 26 now) Was Eric Carle's master work. His protagonist is beset with a similar eternal hunger that goes unsatiated. A hunger that only the most voracious of readers may comprehend. Yet nothing he comes across can put and end to the great hunger he feels. He sits down and meditates, relinquishing his agency on the world for a great while, absolving himself from the physical world, and ascends into a higher form of being.this may seem like massive spoilers but I assure you the novel goes so much further in depth than my paltry summation could ever give justice to. Eric Carle is a genius of an age, an unmatched warrior of the pen and it genuinely shocks me that his works go underappreciated. Though he has written many, the book I have outlined will appear to you clearly, in fact, I shall not mention its title. Let it be a test to see if you are truly ready for this metamorphosis, this graduation from merely seeking knowledge to ultimately living it.
>>23328327Most books of Coelho have some themes of that.
>>23330461This is an esoteric shitpost because only like 1 person got it.Real talk though, esoteric just means that a trace number of people can understand it, it doesn't mean it's knowledge of value just because it's difficult to grasp. Find some joy in the simpler things as well.
Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
>>23328409lmaobased>>23331566good suggestion, especially tlön uqbar
The King in yellow by Robert W. Chambers
>>23328327Demian - Hermann Hesse
What is of real value is how you apply these things in your personal life. Anyone here care to give examples?
>xeYears ago we had an anon who regularly started threads with picrel and OP would just be a few letters like the above. I often think about him and suspect he was trying to tell us something important, something which could not be given in a single post. Someone should find all of his threads and compile them so we can find out, it will not be an easy job and would require using all the various archives since they all seemed to be having issues in those days and regularly went down and sometimes the threads probably got deleted before one of the archives snagged them but the others may have gotten it in time.
the da vinci code
La-bas, Huysmans
Really good book. I always hold that Robert Anton Wilson’s non-Illuminatus books (besides his probably most well-known nonfiction work, Prometheus Rising) are strongly underrated. The premise is Aleister Crowley, James Joyce, and Albert Einstein getting caught up in an occult murder mystery, along with the (fictional) Sir John Babcock as a major character and lens through which the story is told, with him also interacting with and meeting Joyce/Einstein/Crowley. It sounds really kitschy, but he actually pulls it off very well. There’s influences from Gothic fiction, from Lovecraft, and from Joyce (the stream-of-consciousness style of Ulysses employed in parts, and in others the dream-language of Finnegans Wake to represent characters’ actual dreams or hallucinatory fugues/occult experiences).On a sentence-by-sentence, stylistic basis, I think it outshines Illuminatus! (also worth reading as it also has what you’re asking for), as well as in terms of the plotting (it’s actually not as much of a shaggy-dog-tale like Illuminatus and doesn’t veer into as many disparate subplots, it’s more tightly plotted and actually pretty gripping after a certain point). And a lot of serious research into and knowledge of Western occultism, magical and mystical teachings, and initiatory/secret societies from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to the A∴A∴ and Masonry and more I’m probably forgetting.
>>23331859By personal life I assume you mean going to restaurants and playing Red Dead Redemption 2?
>>23332028Obviously
>>23328327Der Golem by Meyrink is exactly this, and I liked it a lot. The whole thing is about occult mysteries and their discovery by the protagonist, with a lot of symbols interwoven. Meyrink himself was very genuinely interested in the occult, so the presentation is sincere in the book.
